I wish someone would build modern lean utils. I don't need bazillion grep flags. There's so much unnecessary repetition in unix tools. Why make separate flag for input and output files when I can just redirect input and output with shell, just for one example. Theoretically most unix tools could be implemented in very few lines of code and that's their beauty.
> Theoretically most unix tools could be implemented in very few lines of code and that's their beauty.
As usual, theory and practice should be the same in theory, but they are different in practice.
It turns out that the Unix philosophy of gluing together programs by spitting out and re-parsing text is both extraordinarily brittle for automation purposes, and quite tedious for manual work.
So, to make realistic use of these tools, there's lots of flags to force the output to be as structured as possible for various automation tasks, to make parsing the output tractable (and to ask for explicit guarantees on the format).
Then, to achieve many common tasks without having to write your own parser and text manipulation in awk or whatever, you need many other flags for transformations which are trivial on the base data types but complex for formatted text, such as sorting files by a last modified (which is `ls -lt` with flags, and a terrible amount of work that I'm not going to go into using Unix pipes - at least if you want to support such complex things like file names including whitespace, or dates in the current locale).
